


Between the Bars

by StrikeTeamDelta (panicsdownpour)



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, a little bit of angst and a dash of canon divergent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:14:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22233862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panicsdownpour/pseuds/StrikeTeamDelta
Summary: A routine information extraction mission goes sideways with Bucky missing. When she finds him -or rather when he finds her- Natasha gets a little trip down memory lane.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10
Collections: BuckyNat Secret Santa 2019





	Between the Bars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starsandsupernovae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandsupernovae/gifts).



> A slight twist on the request:
> 
> _Helping the other to escape brainwashing by forcing them to remember_
> 
> A gift for the fabulous starsandsupernovae , as part of the Buckynat Secret Santa 2019 Gift Exchange. Hope you had an amazing holiday season, and that you enjoy this little piece of angsty pining!

"You tried to freeze my eye out with these. With pizza rolls." 

It was the singularly happiest she had been to hear an utterance so ridiculous in her entire life. How, after everything Natasha had been through in her life - the blood, sweat, tears, death, loss, and hardwork- had her love found itself hinged, or rather saved, by frozen snack food? Bucky had repeated himself, but Natasha was too stunned to find the words. "Nat? Hello? You remember that? After you laughed at me." After a day as damned ridiculous as the one they had had- the one she had cooked up, for him- Natasha should have been able to believe it more easily. ___________________________________________________________________________________ 

The day had started just before dawn, with Natasha sat cross legged on the hood of her department issued sedan, staring straight ahead with the same discontented focus she had since the earliest hours of the morning, chin in her palm, elbow rested on her knee, regarding the figure sat on the work bench in front of her. There had been exactly two calls and exactly two visits made; the secrecy of the matter was of the utmost importance to her, if she was going to fix the problem and keep it from alarming the wrong people. There could be consequences from the nervous, consequences from the trigger happy, consequences from those who had been sitting impatiently in the wings waiting for a shortcoming that would lend the perfect excuse to make use of their shackles.

"Still nothing?”

"You know, you asked that a dozen times already. No, wait...that makes thirteen. You're wasting your time, девушка .”

His sulk lifted only enough to betray the slightest of sympathies for the woman in black who had taken to pacing; over the course of hours he had seen a range of emotions in tiny cracks in the coolness of her demeanor. They might have been calculated, but he didn't think so. It was in the littlest things that there was the most truth, those things that might have drawn no attention if there wasn't a trained eye and a motivation to read the tells.

“You should get some rest. I can manage myself. You’ve done enough,” he stated matter of factly; confidence was enough to make people doubt what they knew to be true, so it might talk her down off the ledge she was on.

Bucky knew her, but not clearly. He knew she was safe, but he knew that nobody was truly trustworthy where they had come from. Not a lot made sense but the singular strongest memory he was sure of was the memory of cold and steel and order, an unassuming fortress he would know on sight. One he knew he could find, if the woman he couldn’t place would let him think for a while without the incessant questioning. And even if he couldn’t find where he belonged, the places he remembered -it was possible he was confusing home for the wrong memories, or even for a film scene, with the clarity the memories lacked- he needed her to stop. 

The whirlwind hadn’t stopped since he had stumbled on to the aircraft in Vienna, passed out face down and bloody among their gear, and woken in a stranger’s bed with someone tending to him that had looked personally stung when he’d nearly flung himself from the window to escape. Since then he’d come back to himself a little. Bucky could remember he’d been working but not on what, could remember Steve and his place but only hazy clips across a spattering of places. His thoughts seemed to spiral, fall in on themselves, build back up into what he had trouble making sense of. The reality in it all faded in and out; he had been set straight by Steve but still wasn't quite settled.

As time went on since he’d been compromised, his memories cleared faster, but there were still gaps with no progress, and that was what Natasha was most concerned about. 

"нет. Your home is here and so is mine. It has been for a long time. Yours, yours was here. Before we were together, before you were brought to Russia. Like Steve told you.”

His memories had been cycling, Natasha had noticed. Steve had been there earlier - he was one of her two very concise calls for help- and talked to him. He'd been able to remind him of their friendship, but only parts. It seemed like he could feel it, mostly trusted it, but the memories were slow in coming to clarity. The struggling had slowed when memories of feeling settled, of existing out in public instead of in secret finally felt real, though he had been agitated still since. He may have been convinced that there was no fight with them, but there was no memory of their life together in recent years and confused, conflicting specters where he should have remembered their time as partners, as hidden lovers, as captives. Natasha was sure parts would return, that he wasn't a threat aside from to himself in the event he started to question again his returned knowledge gained from Steve's retellings, casting it away in favor of boarding a plane to north of Belarus and froze trying to find the home base from a past long over.

When the Tesseract had ensnared Clint, a solid crack of his skull into a wrought iron rail had done the trick; in Bucky's case, Natasha was determined to traverse the path of least violence. Violence would trigger a fight she was less concerned about winning or losing and more fearful that it would draw attention to a skip in his brain that the agency higher ups would call upon as proof he was a continued danger to the public. After all the work he had put in and everything Steve and hell, her heart, had put in moving heaven and earth to bring him to a place of a life, a good one, again, Natasha wasn't having it.

She wouldn't lose him again.

"We're going to figure this out.”

It was only a matter of time. She was a goal setter and there was only so long he would spend off the radar without a check in, especially with odd movements recorded. Forty eight hours. Forty eight hours and she'd have him back- or she was chartering two tickets out and buying herself more time. But forty eight hours was the goal that didn't mean trouble for her too. 2 days it was.

"Listen, if I take you out with me, or ask you to come, whatever, I need you to swear you're not going to do anything stupid. Or run off. You going rogue isn't going to cut it Steve told you what happened more than once, you remember him okay now, right? And that there's nobody anywhere waiting for you besides the goons who scrambled you", she explained calmly, staring just out of arms reach while he assessed the identification cards she had returned to him, brittled from fiery heat they had escaped from once she'd dragged him out of the facility.

It was supposed to be a routine extraction mission; they were regular partners now, a choice made questionable now. She should probably be grateful some of their worst spars hadn't been memories of her that had stuck; that paired with the erasure of recent months and the scrambling of everything else would have no doubt made for the worst of altercations between them. Natasha could hold her own, but she had fought the people she cared about enough times in her life.

"Do you trust me, that something is wrong?”

"I trust that I don't know what the hell is going on. And that you might be a solid bet until we do. Steve thinks so. So fine. Let's finish this thing so I can sleep.”

Sleep deprivation certainly wasn't helping his mood. Since the first sleep had done nothing good for his memory, neither Natasha, Steve, nor Fury had thought a further rest to be a good idea. Agitation would do more good than a wiped clean slate. Hopefully being kept awake would give his mind time to settle and readjust, bring things back and undo the brain-frying they'd done, and she would do her best to help the rest, the parts worst hit. Of course it had to be the part that meant the most to her.  
This was no time for woe is me, but it flitted through her mind as the vice grip in her chest squeezed particularly hard.

"I'll take that. Come on.”

//

Their first stop was an alley behind some dilapidated apartment buildings, all cracked bricks and chipped paint. It was slated for demolition, but then it had been for two decades at that point. "A mostly empty rat nest of a building is what we schlepped all the way out here for. I haven't lived here in ages; nobody has. You realize where we came from has the same crummy thing, and neither has a point? Can we go now that we've seen it? Or do we need a tour of the resort too?"

Natasha had plans to start from the ground up, tracing their way back to and through straightening up his muddled memories. And they were going to start long before she had come up into the picture, before the worst of the worst or even the hint of the war that had brought him to his present state, in a round about way. From here, she had an extremely condensed mental list of stops; there was no way to hit the entirety of instances she -and Steve- thought might help, but they were running even lower on time than she had planned thanks to train traffic. So much for saving time. 

"Trust me," Natasha insisted firmly, clapping a hand on his shoulder, "and come on. We won't be here long anywhere; there are a few more things we need to do." Her hand lingered longer than he was comfortable with, but he didn't shrug her off, only shooting a look at where it rested until she flitted away without acknowledging the question in his expression. It didn't sit well with him, clash between a strange well of emotion in his chest and the logic in his head that said she was too friendly to him for a trained partner. Emotion wasn't fact, though; it did nothing to support Natasha's earliest claims and Steve's story. Steve could be going on hearsay, and none of what he had heard spoke to his sensibility louder than the draw back, back to home base and whatever duty lay there. "Lead the way. I have things to do." What exactly, he couldn't be sure of, but they were important. 

"Then let's make this stop quick. But watch your steps. The floor inside is ancient and you're not exactly up for featherweight champion." 

With that Natasha made her way up the fire escape and disappeared from sight without a look back, leaving Bucky to begrudgingly catch up. He scrambled up the rusty ladder and a set of steps, made the precarious transfer inside where time had not been no better to the insides of the place than to the outsides. Patches of water stained wall had crumbled away to reveal sagging wood planks, scraps of old rug and tattered wallpaper scattering the floor along with broken furniture and old beer cans. "Remind me never road trip with you again, ever. Where the hell even are you?" He picked his way slowly across the creaky floorboards, stepping carefully around a suspicious stain near a closet door. 

"Down here."

Ducking into the hallway, he spotted the glow of artificial light two doors down. Bucky kept near the wall out of precaution and made his way towards the sounds of busyness. Turning the corner, he found himself looking at what, he wasn't sure. In front of him, in a crudely furnished room complete with place settings on the not quite level card table and a lamp with duck-taped top, unlit.

From her backpack Natasha procured thermos, its sloshing contents still hot. "Take it." She passed it off brusquely, the lid loosened, and took a seat at the sofa pulled up to the table in place of a second chair. The nostalgia was so strong it made him almost dizzy from that first inhale, the sense fleeting. "Bamonte's. Used to be my favorite as a kid. My parents would haul us kids there for supper and promotions at school. Just the big ones."

She was biding her time as well. It seemed the most important parts of his memory to his safety would return if they could just wait it out and she could keep him relatively contained and locked down, until then. This was a two part mission. But she wouldn't let him forget her. So she'd walk them back through milestone memories without her to get there. 

_"Wedding soup. You could have led with that when you barged in, you know?"_ The man's past heckling came back to her, the vision of him red nosed and scowling, crumpled tissues in hand as he sipped at it nearby. 

Some time ago, the better part of a year past, Natasha had made the sappily grand gesture to bring him that same soup and the rest of home cooked meal from the very same place. He'd been sick and grouchy, recovering in Wakanda, and he hadn't in the least remembered their time in the Red Room or their clandestine unaccounted time back then. But it had been the start of something, something she hadn't anticipated. She sat perched on the blessedly covered, moth bitten couch and watched him take in the authentic, worn down mix and match of 30's decor.

Natasha was hoping for a two for one special; he could strengthen his memories of his childhood, despite the poor reproduction she'd built, and he could remember her place in the very recent past. 

Bucky poured them both a bowl, his just a bit more full, and helped himself. It was a strange stop on a strange trip, but then, it had been a strange last two days. The taste was better than the smell. It was as close to home as he could get while stuck roughly seventy years away. The woman was strange, he still couldn't place her in a way that felt comfortable, right, but she wasn't half bad.

"Okay. So is this like a crappy picnics tour? I mean, thank you. Thanks. But we have things to do. No?”

“No,” she replied, stifling a sigh of exasperation, “just one picnic stop, so eat up.”

One step at a time. Panic didn't suit her.

Their soup stop was one of a half a dozen stops and conversations Natasha tried to work in to do something, anything to jog his memory. She had done everything short of strapping to a chair and bringing in a hypnotist, or maybe Bruce and one of his machines. There was a trip to the World Fair exhibit, a long retelling of a particularly nasty spar between them back when they'd trained together. There was a handful of Polaroids she had taken last Christmas that had received little aside from a blank stare and strained, polite acknowledgement that they looked like a nice time. 

By the time Natasha decided to call it quits for the night, ready to collapse at just past midnight, she was already planning for the next day. She would have to ramp it up, she would have to enlist help. Call Clint in, maybe the others. They would pick up again in a few hours, and in the mean time, he would stay at Steve's place since their apartment would serve mainly as a frustration to him if he still couldn't remember why he was living with her. It had made the most sense; they'd both be more comfortable, and Steve could more than handle him. 

When she'd collapsed at the kitchen table, head in her arms and the men digging through the freezer for something to take the edge off, was when it happened. A small avalanche of frozen foods loosed by a wrong tug on a container of ice cream hidden amidst the mash of products had sent the food to the floor, the ruckus drawing an embarrassed groan from Steve and forcing Natasha's head up to check on the noise. In an effort to help, Bucky scooped up an armful of boxes and bags, standing too fast to miss bumping his head on the still open door. Scowling, he rubbed at the sore spot before getting on with the task of refilling. When he came to one particular package, he paused, brows furrowed. 

"You tried to freeze my eye out with these. With pizza rolls. 'member that?" A grin spread across his face, a heavy hand pushing through his hair as he held up the icy package. ""Nat? Hello? You remember that? After you laughed at me." He said it without confusion, without question. 

When she found her tongue, Natasha had to swear. "Do _I_ remember? Do you know what I went through today for you- and Totinos is what brings it all back?" 

The event in question had happened well over a year earlier. 

_"I can't see the tv and you're holding it on too hard. You want to take my eye out too?" The grumbling occurred at regular intervals, the crooning of Bing Crosby on the radio singing of love and late night walks while Natasha held a bag of pepperoni pizza rolls to the fist size bloom of red and purple beneath the skin of Bucky's cheek. Still adjusting to having one arm gone - temporary as that would turn out to be- he had crashed face first into a cupboard after taking a hard right hook to the hip from a counter top during a simulation training exercise. As much as she had tried to stifle it, Natasha had broken into uncontrollable laughter that had suckered him in after he had drawn his pride back up again. No kid gloves for him then, certainly none while icing his face. Even if he could done with the babying being a little more tender. They'd compared notes late into the night, gotten in a little practice that took out a lamp but made him feel better, and Natasha had left the next morning promising not to contradict the story he had worked up as an excuse for the bruising._

It was a throw away night for someone else maybe, but it had stuck with her. And apparently with him.

"What do you-?" Bucky did had the chance to finish his question because Natasha had thrown guarded to the wind and stomped right up in front him. 

"You've got to be kidding me. Tell me you're kidding. The whole day, and now you remember me?"

"What are you talking about, Nat?" 

"What did you do today?" She questioned, eyes narrowed. The casual use of the nickname after a day and a half of confusion and being treated like any coworker he'd ever had was enough to make her want to scream. "Do you remember what we did? What happened last night?" she fired off.

"We saw my old place, had lunch. Not the most romantic place- at least I know I don't have to plan anything elaborate for you Valentine's Day- and I don't know. 'm tired. Don't remember all of it. Why? What?" A look of amused confusion twisted Bucky's features as he tried to figure out where the woman's reaction was coming from. "Last night...we worked. And we got up early and... concussion?" He offered a guess; she was making him nervous. His arms closed around her when hers were tossed around his neck, the force of her embrace forcing him to bump the open freezer. The cold made him flinch but he resisted letting go. Her head buried against his neck, her answer was muffled.

"We'll talk about it later. Just shut up for a minute. You don't know what that head of yours put me through today." Natasha went quiet, the relief so strong she could have cried with the weight of the day so suddenly lifted. When she spoke, her words were choked by unshed tears. "Don't forget me again. Swear."

"I-" Bucky thought better of it and did just as he'd been ordered. Squeezing her tighter, he shook his head and exhaled a laugh. Whatever he'd done, he'd find out in time, and it was bound to be a story if she was talking like that. Curiosity and questioning would win out later. For now, the important business. 

"Wouldn't dream of it, darlin'."


End file.
